ust over six weeks before the nation holds the first
general election in which touch-screen voting will play a major role,
specialists agree that whatever the remaining questions about the
technology's readiness, it is now too late to make any significant
changes.
Whether or not the machines are ready for the election - or the
electorate ready for the machines - there is no turning back. In what may
turn out to be one of the most scrutinized general elections in the
country's history, nearly one-third of the more than 150 million
registered voters in the United States will be asked to cast their ballots
on machines whose accuracy and security against fraud have yet to be
tested on such a grand scale.
Because of the uncertainties, experts say there is potential for
post-election challenges in any precincts where the machines may
malfunction, or where the margin of victory is thin. Sorting out such
disputes could prove difficult.
"The possibility for erroneous votes or malicious programming is not as
great as critics would have you believe," said Doug Chapin, the director
of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan group tracking election reform. "But
it's more than defenders of the technology want to admit. The truth lies
somewhere in between."
Since the 2000 presidential election and its contentious aftermath,
voting systems that record votes directly on a computer - as opposed to
those that use mechanical levers or optically scanned paper ballots - have
quickly moved to the center of a rancorous debate. The disagreement pits
those who see them as unacceptably vulnerable to vote manipulation and
fraud against those who see them as an antidote to the wretched hanging
chad.
Even in the final run-up to November's elections, the issue remains in
flux. In California, the machines have been certified, decertified and
recertified again. In Ohio, a closely contested state, an electronic
upgrade to the state's predominantly punch-card system was halted in July
by the secretary of state there, who cited unresolved security concerns.
All the while, a vocal mixture of computer scientists, local
voting-rights groups and freelance civic gadflies have relentlessly cited
security flaws in many of the machines, with some going so far as to say
that the flaws could be intentional and accusing the major companies of
having ties to conservative political causes.
The companies and election officials have fought back bitterly,
accusing the activists of being wild-eyed fearmongers. A study released by
Electionline.org last month would seem to suggest that partisan politics
plays less of a role than critics have claimed.
That report found "no industrywide partisan trend to political
contributions among the largest election system companies." The leader in
the electronic voting machine market, Diebold, and its executives have
given more than $400,000 to Republican interests since 2001, the study
found. But other large companies, including Election Systems &
Software and Sequoia Voting Systems, "gave a slight edge to Democratic
candidates and party organizations."
Concerns over the security and accuracy of the machines have proved
harder to dispel, though, and they have not always come from the fringe.
At the end of June, two prestigious groups - the Brennan Center for
Justice at New York University School of Law and the Leadership Conference
on Civil Rights - issued a set of recommendations for technical upgrades
and procedures that they said could help shore up high-tech voting systems
in time for the November elections.
Nancy Zirkin, the deputy director of the Leadership Conference, said
she thought that the report had been taken seriously, but conceded that
the group did not know how many states or precincts had actually adopted
the recommendations.
Other critics say that too little has been done in response to numerous
problems - and that it is now too late to do much more before the
election, because software and technology have to be tested and "frozen"
well ahead of voting to avoid malfunctions and electoral chaos.
"Switching now, approximately 40 days before the election, would
probably introduce more security problems than it would avoid," said Aviel
D. Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who
brought many of the vulnerabilities in voting systems to light.
Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, is among those who
wonder whether the technology is ready for prime time. As she tried out
one of Maryland's new machines at a folk festival last weekend, an
apparent slip of her hand generated a "no" vote when she intended to vote
"yes," before the error was caught and corrected.
By last Monday, Ms. Mikulski had signed on to Senate legislation that
would require all electronic voting terminals around the nation to
generate a paper record for each vote. But there are no such capabilities
in the AccuVote TS touch-screen systems that will be used throughout
Maryland and in many other states that have adopted touch screens or other
electronic voting devices. And it is too late to add them.
The Maryland system is far from foolproof, in the view of Michael
Wertheimer, a computer security consultant with RABA Technologies, who was
hired by the state of Maryland last year to conduct a mock hacking attack
against the Diebold machines. A number of security holes were found,
including one in the Microsoft operating system that runs the election
software, which did not have up-to-date security patches. The flaws, Mr.
Wertheimer said, could allow tampering and skewed election results.
He also noted that in the presidential primary election last March,
Maryland used software on its machines that had not been certified by
independent testing authorities, and thus violated state law.
But Linda Lamone, the administrator of the state's election laws, has
repeatedly stated that her office has taken the necessary steps to improve
the Diebold machines. She says that issues of uncertified software have
been corrected and that Maryland's election system is secure.
The Maryland Court of Appeals appears to agree. On Tuesday, the court
rejected a suit brought by a Maryland voter group, TrueVoteMD, which
sought to force the state to further improve security on its machines and
offer voters a paper-ballot alternative.
Still, as the days dwindle, paper remains at the heart of the debate.
Nevada, another state that will make near-universal use of touch-screen
voting in November, purchased machines manufactured by Sequoia that
produce a paper record - a move that received high marks earlier this
month from the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative group in
Washington. "Without an actual paper ballot, we are then left with only
the computer's word for the election results," the group said in a news
release accompanying its informal "Election Preparedness Scorecard" three
weeks ago.
The group gave grades of F to several states - including Kentucky,
Maryland, Delaware and Tennessee - based on their degree of reliance on
paperless electronic voting. Florida, whose results will almost certainly
receive intense scrutiny, received an F-plus, while Georgia was given an
F-minus. New Mexico, a swing state that will rely heavily on touch-screen
voting on Nov. 2, received a D-minus.
Harris N. Miller, president of the Information Technology Association
of America, a trade group that represents many of the voting machine
makers, concedes that the industry has probably not been sensitive enough
to the political nuances surrounding voting technology - particularly in
the aftermath of the 2000 election. But he argued that the fears expressed
by many of those opposed to electronic voting are driven as much by
ignorance as by passion.
"What we're replacing is a system that was broken - so broken that
Congress passed a special law," he said, referring to the Help America
Vote Act of 2002, which was designed to help overhaul the nation's
election system in the aftermath of the 2000 debacle. "It was so broken
that Congress appropriated over a billion dollars to fix it," he said.
The law, which established the Election Assistance Commission,
generally encourages the movement away from punch cards and the
exploration of other voting technologies. The law also calls for the
federal standards agency, the National Institute for Standards and
Technology, to develop universal standards for voting systems. But the
agency says the $500,000 Congress appropriated last year for such efforts
has been exhausted, and Congress did not provide additional funds for the
effort in 2004.
As for security concerns, Mr. Miller said that vendors submit their
source code - the underlying instructions for the machines' software - for
independent inspection, to uncover any hidden programming and to ensure
that the machines calculate properly.
Critics, however, point out that the labs inspecting the software are
typically paid by the vendors themselves, and that they somehow failed to
uncover the flaws discovered by Mr. Wertheimer, Professor Rubin, and
election officials in Ohio, Maryland and elsewhere.
While it is too late in the game to make it possible to produce a paper
record for each vote on every machine already deployed, Mr. Miller said
that vendors would be willing to include that feature in the future if the
market demanded it. Most of the major vendors have models that can supply
a printed record, but in most cases, Mr. Miller said, election officials
have not required it.
Paper receipts are not automatically required because no such universal
guideline has ever existed. Mechanical lever machines, for instance, which
have been in widespread use since the 1930's - and will still be used by
millions of voters this year - have never produced a paper record of each
vote. And states have traditionally established their own definitions of
what constitutes a ballot.
Still, the scrutiny and criticism that have dogged electronic voting
machines over the last year all but guarantee that a pall of suspicion and
distrust will hang over a technology that awaits approximately 45 million
registered voters if they go to the polls. Whether the concerns are
justified or overblown, experts say, in the wake of the 2000 election
controversy, the mere hint of unreliability this time could turn the
electronic vote, should the margin of victory be narrow, into one more
tinderbox.
"The woods aren't any drier than they were in 2000," Mr. Chapin of
Electionline.org is fond of saying, "but there are a lot more people with
matches."
That is a point that Edward S. Morillo, a representative of the Santa
Clara County Registrar of Voters in California, would probably concede.
Mr. Morillo travels the county acquainting voters with the Sequoia AVC
Edge, the voting machine that will be used there on Nov. 2.
On Wednesday afternoon, he stopped by the Indian Health Center in San
Jose.
As patients and employees took turns poking at the screen, an
occasional "What is it?" or "Oops!" seemed to foretell what ballot workers
might expect on Election Day.
Mr. Morillo said that reactions to the touch screens have generally
been mixed, and that Santa Clara County - like every California county
where similar electronic voting is in place - would offer a paper ballot
alternative for those who, for whatever reason, are not comfortable with
the machines.
"The thing about the touch screen,'' he said, "is that you either love
it or hate it."
John Schwartz and Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting for this
article.